The Salmon River Road

Between Riggins and Shoup lay nearly seventy-five miles of roadless canyon—narrow, steep, and unforgiving. The vast wilderness had turned away railway engineers, and only prospectors and pack trains dared venture there.

Most of the CCC crew were city boys. They arrived underweight—young men of a generation that had come of age when there were no jobs at all, much less work in one of the most rugged canyons in Idaho.

For many it was their first sustained labor, their first time away from home, and their first encounter with a place where the river ran fast, the hills rose straight up, and mistakes could not simply be shrugged off.

The Civilian Conservation Corps began cutting grades into the rock walls above the river, widening the rough wagon road into Shoup before turning their attention to the bridge site above the Pine Creek rapid, where the Salmon River pinched tight between the canyon walls.

CCC Boys Came to Town

By Lorne Callahan

Earl and I had the entire second floor of the boarding house to ourselves. When we had a dance, we would move our bed against the wall and turn the whole place into a dance hall.

People began arriving all day Saturday. They brought all kinds of food. Some CCC boys would come early with boxes of food and extra chairs. All the women—and some of the cooks from the CCC camp—helped Mom prepare the meal. The boys always brought boxes of metal plates and utensils, pots and pans.

People arrived in old cars, wagons, trucks, and even on horseback. Some parked down by our neighbors, the Coxes, and walked up the big hill because things got pretty congested.

All of us kids played together, many of us meeting for the first time. People came from as far away as Gibbonsville. The CCC boys carried us around on their shoulders and played with us kids.

The music started at dusk. We would all go upstairs and sit on benches that lined the wall. We'd listen to the music with new sounds of trumpets and drums now and then. Sometimes the folks tried to get us to dance with girls our own age. I would try with Marge, but I’d get embarrassed. Margy was my only classmate at school and her dad was a rancher upriver—I guess you could say she was my first love.

After a few hours the triangle chime hanging from the porch would ring, and everyone lined up to pile their plates with pork, venison, chicken, ham, trout, salmon, mashed potatoes, gravy, salad, bread, beans, biscuits, rolls, pies, cakes, and cookies.

I would eat so much that I could hardly eat the ice cream that had been hand-cranked all evening.

When we got tired we fell asleep on the benches, our bed piled high with coats and jackets. We would wake to goodbyes shouted from departing vehicles or to the CCC boys singing as they piled into the back of a big green truck.

Some families stayed the night, leaving the adventure of traveling home for daylight. Earl and I bedded down on the floor, giving our bed to the women.

By early morning everyone was cleaning up, and the CCC boys returned armed with mops and pails to help.

The mining operation at the Monolith was done solely by three men. Once a month dad would smelt down the gold. The ore was taken down the mountain by tram to the stamp mill and the process ended under the porch of the boarding house in an old dutch oven. The acrid smell permeated the house and yard for days. The molten mass that remained was placed in rags and the quick silver rung out. What was left that wasn't ash was gold. While the process was antiquated and crude, it did provide enough money to buy supplies, pay wages, purchase groceries and a pair of shoes now and then.

We made a trip to Salmon City each month to exchange the gold for cash, shop and enjoy a dinner at the café. Sometimes the supplies would have to take the place of passengers us kids had to stay at home.

Eleanor would mind Earl and me. She could sure be bossy. When Mom and Dad were gone she ruled with an iron fist if she could catch us and keep us in the house that is. If we got outside we'd run from her, Earl in one direction and I the opposite. If one of us were caught the other would come to his rescue and after being a little battered we could break free and go off somewhere together.

About the time it started getting dark, Eleanor would start calling kind of sweet like, “Come on boys, supper is ready and I have a chocolate cake for you.”

She always got scared in the house alone when it got dark. We would come back and she would treat us real nice. The three of us would sit at the kitchen table and try to play cards or Earl and Eleanor would tell stories. I'd sit there and soak it all up. The kerosene lamp threw shadows all over the room and through the cracks in the big old stove, the glowing embers could be seen.

We always thought the boarding house was haunted. It would creek and groan every night. Some nights when Earl and I were trying to sleep upstairs we'd hear a whole group of people talking. You couldn't hear what they were saying but you could hear the sound of their voices. Many a night we would just lay there too frightened to sleep. Other nights we'd get up enough courage to go downstairs to the kitchen to see if Mom and Dad had company. Mom and Dad would tell us, ’It does sound spooky and we hear the same noises, but it is just the sound echoing through the creek, river and mountains.

On nights we were alone we'd huddle around that kitchen table and when we heard the noises we would stop talking and one of us would say, “Did you hear anything?”

Then we'd all start talking at once because we had all heard the very same sound. Pretty soon it would be quiet and we'd be silent or we would start telling jokes to show how brave we were. Then we'd hear another noise.

“Did you hear that?”

We would wait to hear the sound of Dad's car coming up the mountain. You could usually hear it as it started up Little Hill in second gear and it always seemed to take hours to arrive. Sometimes we'd think we heard the car and hear the noise getting louder and louder until we could hear it at the top of Big Hill, but they never arrived.

This would happen again and again until we'd hear it again and one of us would say, “They're really coming this time.”

We would wait, then hear the car shift to low gear for Big Hill. We'd wait that eternity trying not to act so anxious but eventually one of us would rise and then the other two would rise almost simultaneously and we would run to the door. We would watch the headlights sweep over the top of the hill and make the S-curve, down to the bridge were Dad always stopped to make a check before crossing. Then we would all run to meet them as if we hadn't seen them for a year.

Dad would say, “Hop on kids,” and we would climb onto the running boards and ride into the yard.

We helped unload the car while Mom began fussing over the stove making something delicious. They'd always ask if we had been frightened staying there all alone and we always answered, “Heck no,” lying through our teeth.

Mom had an eventful trip to the outhouse one day, returned worried with a stick in one hand the rattler of a large rattlesnake in the other. Days before she encountered the thing and tried to kill it rather than leave it to bite one of us. All she succeeded in doing was cutting off the warning device—the rattle—and would never have forgiven herself if the snake bite someone. Finding the snake became an obsession of hers. Dad looked all evening for the maimed rattler to no avail and finally gave up. We had to carry a shoved or axe with us to the outhouse and not venture in unless there was plenty of light.

She was determined to find the menace and would make several hunting trips to the outhouse each day. Dad was pressed to duty each morning before work and upon his return.

One day Earl and and I were coming up to the house and saw a scene worth watching. Mom was coming across the bridge with a dead snake draped over the handle of a shovel. Every few feet the snake would slip off to the ground and she would bend over poking and winding until she got that snake draped back onto the handle. When she reached the house she put it on the chopping block and proceeded to chop the snake into tiny pieces.

When she was done exacting her revenge, she wrapped its head in an old rag and buried it far off. The remainder of the day was spent normal and when Dad returned home from the mine he carted away the bloody chopping block. We all loved to reminisce about that one, and we always laughed.

We kept out of the women’s hair most days, going to school in Shoup, weekends in the woods or packing lunches to the men in the mine then hanging back, observing the workers and old Pete hauling the ore to the tram-house, pulling so hard he seemed to squat down on his haunches during the effort.

Earl and I would fight over who was to go upstairs first and climb in between those icy sheets which lay under a pile of blankets. After shivering and shaking, watching the breath steam in the room, an icy cold foot would touch some part of your now warming body and a draft of cold air crept through the parted covers. Then the battle for the warm spot in the bed began . . .

The winters brought sled rides down Little Hill and forbidden rides careening down Big Hill. We used cast aside washing basins the miners of the 1880's left behind. The basins spun us all the way down the mountainside to school, and many a day Earl and I arrived at the schoolhouse soaking wet after spinning right into the freezing waters of Boulder Creek. The better part of the school day, our teacher was drying our clothes and thawing us out.

It was all a big adventure. The going to school, being in school all day, snowball fights, getting our faces washed in snow when Eleanor could catch us - when she said we were bad. The exploring on the way home and ending up in the big kitchen, with Mom and Dad and that friendly big stove. The smell of luscious home made bread, or dough-gods, cakes, cookies, and wonderful home made candy.

We were at a perfect age to live downriver, too young to work the mines but old enough to explore on our own. When dad could spare Pete for an afternoon we clambered and scrambled onto the large broad back of that gentle, patient workhorse and headed for the joys of the wilderness. Eleanor was usually dropped off at Aunt Alta’s.

Sometimes we would go down to Pine Creek, my grandfather's and dad's old ranch. Dad didn't like us to go this far, as he said it wasn't ours any more. A friend of dad's owned it now. We saw the cabins where Dad and Alta had lived when they were kids.

The roofs were sagging and the place in general disarray and we felt they should have been kept up, as Dad was brought up here and our family used to own and live on this land. Our old ranch was made up of a series of bench land surrounded by pine forest, with Pine Creek running through it. We didn't go there too often, as we always felt kind of sad about it.

We visited old prospectors and tried to find the hermits that dotted the mountainsides in make-shift shacks and caves. Many a day they we were late arriving home because the old men, so lonesome for company, would talk our ears off. Hacksaw Tom,[2] a collector of rattlesnakes and master of oddity, was someone who always fascinated us.

The swinging bridges that crossed the river, taunted us to forbidden danger and often crossed. Earl slipped through the broken boards of one such bridge one day, only nearly escaping a plunge into the treacherous Salmon river that would have most certainly claimed his life. Cables were stretched across the river in places, which suspended a small wooden trough that could occupy one person - or two young boys. We gave up the pursuit of mastering the hand over hand delicate operation of crossing the river after Earl almost lost his fingers between a pulley and the cable. It was too scary and not as fun as we thought it would be.

Our favorite swimming hole was one that dad didn't approve of. It was about four feet deep in the center where the current was real swift, then it tapered to the grassy shore. It had a nice sandy bottom and two big flat rocks in the deep part. You could stand up there and rest on them if you got tired. We would let the current of Boulder Creek sweep us off the rocks so we could splash into the shallow part. This pool was located between the boardinghouse and the mill.

Dad kept a homemade cement mixer down in a workshop beneath the porch. It was made out of old lumber and the perfect size for a boat, measuring about three feet long and a foot and a half deep. Earl and I spent the better part of one morning getting it into the creek and rode it down to our favorite pool. It was a rough trip and we capsized about four times on the way.

The only bad part about our pool was the water was very swift and it plunged our boat out over the edge of our pool where we got hung up on the rocks. If we hadn't have gotten wedged on the rocks we would have gone crashing over a fifteen foot waterfall.[3] It took us the rest of the day, with many falls and skinned knees, to beach the boat.

The next day we got ourselves a couple of long poles and used them to push us out of the current when we wanted to. We played all morning in the boat until it started taking water and capsizing us. We then discovered that when a boat is upside down, you can duck under water and there is air beneath the inverted boat. After we made this discovery, we were content to play beneath the boat talking and making noises so we could enjoy the strange echoing our voices made.

All of a sudden we were attacked by some lunging monster! We felt it come down on the boat's bottom and it cracked down on our heads. We heard all kinds of splashing and strangling noises and something big, that looked kind of blue, yellow and white was in the water with us. It frightened us out of our wits and we hurriedly swam out from under the boat to try an escape. As we came up in the water we saw the "monster”— it was our mom.

She was in four feet of water coughing and sputtering as she wailed, "My poor boys!"

We grabbed her and pulled her to shore and when she realized we hadn't drown she began laughing and crying. We pulled her onto a rock but losing our balance we fell with her back into about two feet of water. We tried to tell her we were only playing but she remained torn between anger and relief.

Once home we tried teasing her out of the anger but when Dad got home she told him all about the escapade and we received another one of our long remembered spankings.

One day Earl and I headed home from school wearing our bib overalls and "new" white shirts that Mom had made us from some of Dad's old ones. We topped Little Hill and stopped to talk with Mrs. Cox and watch her girls run and flee as they always did when we arrived. Then we headed toward home once again climbing the canyon and rounding another curve.

We both noticed a Fool Hen[4] along the creek bank and started throwing rocks at it. It tried to fly a little and made it to the center of the creek where it perched on a rock. We continued heaving our rocks and the hen just ducked her head into her wing. We threw and threw until finally, one of us hit the bird, and it fell into the creek. We both claimed to have hit her.

We fished the grouse out of the water and went up around the bend. We rung its neck and then began to worry for one of the things that Mrs. Cox had just informed us about—a visit from two federal game wardens. They had been up to her place recently asking if they knew of anyone in our area who were killing game out of season. Earl got all wound up re-telling all this and I began expecting to see a federal man jump out from behind any tree or rock and grab us. We had no idea what the season on grouse was.

Earl told me to hide it under my shirt. We proceeded up the creek and I could feel the warm blood flowing from the bird and I was terrified a game warden might see us and I had no idea what they did to people like us. We finally made it to the boarding house and saw mom peek out of the kitchen door.

Earl put his bloody hand over his belly and yelled, "Ooooh Mom, I've been shot!"

According to one of the CCC boys, Harvey Huffaker—who would later marry Eleanor Callahan—Ed took it upon himself to show the boys how to live in the country they had been sent to improve. He taught them how to hunt and fish—how to read the water, move quietly, and bring something home that mattered.

It was practical instruction, offered without ceremony, and it bridged the distance between men who had grown up with a scarcity of work and a man who had spent his life moving wherever work could be found.